This article seeks to explore the applicability of the 40 Inventive Principles of classical TRIZ across the food industry. The work comes in the wake of initial work to investigate the usefulness of TRIZ to help solve food related problems (Reference 1). The intention here has been to develop a food industry analogue to previously published articles highlighting examples of the 40 Principles in engineering (Reference 2), business (Reference 3) and architecture (Reference 4) environments.

Use this document as a reference when seeking to ‘eliminate’ food-related design contradictions using the 40 Inventive Principles. Future articles will explore the applicability of other TRIZ tools in the definition and solution of food production, processing and packaging problems.

We have colour-coded the examples such that text in green relates to ‘food processing’ concepts and ideas, and blue text relates to ‘food packaging’ solutions.

Principle 1. Segmentation

A. Divide an object into independent parts.

Separate ‘fruit’ and ‘yoghurt’ portions in a yoghurt container

TV Dinners

‘Salt’n’Shake’ potato chips contain separate sachet of flavouring

Ice cubes

Cheese slices

Striped (tooth)paste container

Individual cup coffee sachets

Segmented Garlic Bread/ French Baguettes

DairyLea Lunchables

B. Make an object easy to assemble or disassemble.

‘Just add hot water’ snack pots

Silver-foil milk bottle tops

Tear-strip/weak-point/etc openings

Microwave dinners where no removal of packaging or film piercing is needed??

Thermo-chromic containers inform the user when the product has been properly heated through

Thermochromic paint on egg informs user when the egg has soft, medium or hard- boiled (I think we should patent this one!)

Lids of pre-cooked foods detach when product is heated through (this also helps to control the browning process and eliminate the tendency to burn the topping)

Use odour to inform user when food is cooked

Kettle whistles when water is boiling

Thermo-chromic advertising (i.e. when temp drops to a certain level- “it’s cold why not pop into starbucks and buy a hot coffee, when the temp increases to a certain level- “it’s hot, why not pop into starbucks and by a nice iced tea)????

B. If feedback is already used, change its magnitude or influence in accordance with operating conditions.

Introduce increasingly sensitive sensors in order to better understand a food process.

Introduce intelligent sensors and control methods. Sensors and controls that monitor production hall temps and change operating temps accordingly.

Include disposable, fold out plates with certain food products (such as ready made salads etc.???

Inclusion of disposable plastic blade connected to packaging- could be used as a means of customisable levels of fragmentation and segmentation (e.g. mixed salads, consumer can chop it up to his/her own preference???

B. Use electric, magnetic and electromagnetic fields to interact with the object.

Irradiation

Ohmic heating

C. Change from static to movable fields, from unstructured fields to those having structure.

Intelligent microwaves

D. Use fields in conjunction with field-activated (e.g. ferromagnetic) particles.

Heat a substance containing ferromagnetic material by using varying magnetic field. When the temperature exceeds the Curie point, the material becomes paramagnetic, and no longer absorbs heat (not sure if this has any food application – yet)

Principle 29. Pneumatics and hydraulics

A. Use gas and liquid parts of an object instead of solid parts (e.g. inflatable, filled with liquids, air cushion, hydrostatic, hydro-reactive).

Sauce concentrates that change flavour depending on what is added e.g. Unox Townsend and Eine Sauce- with incorporates a concentrated sauce paste (parameter changes) to make one litre of brown, white or tomato sauce (increase dynamism).

Change the emissivity properties of an object subject to radiant heating

Use emissivity of container to better control heating profile/rate

Principle 33. Homogeneity

A. Make objects interacting with a given object of the same material (or material with identical properties).

Make the container out of the same material as the contents, to reduce chemical reactions.

Principle 34. Discarding and recovering

A. Make portions of an object that have fulfilled their functions go away (discard by dissolving, evaporating, etc.) or modify these directly during operation.

Ice structures: use water ice or carbon dioxide (dry ice) to make a template for a rammed earth structure, such as a temporary dam. Fill with earth, then, let the ice melt or sublime to leave the final structure.

Dry pasta +sauce products utilise this principle- some water is absorbed (to cook the pasta) the rest evaporates.

Use ice as a means of separating products instead of more packaging in the same container (would work excellently in frozen products)???